Meet Kendrick Thomas, an easygoing American wine merchant happily residing in Provence. Ever eager to enjoy all the gastronomic pleasures available in France, he often finds himself on the doorstep of Henri Poupon. Thick of finger and feature, Poupon is as physically untamed and earthy as his skill as a chef is delicate and exquisite.

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A PREVIEW OF CHAPTER ONE

On the first Monday of April 2006, Kendrick Thomas was preparing to leave his home outside Le Caniveau in Provence for a flight to Alsace, in what is nowadays the northeastern corner of France instead of the southwestern corner of Germany. In other words, from France’s Mediterranean bottom to its Teutonic top. He would be on the same day’s late flight back, so there was not much to prepare, other than himself. A morning cup of coffee in hand, with the other he parted strands of his cork mosquito curtain and stepped out from the kitchen onto the terrace. As the sun rose in the east, a vast, profusely blue sky deepened overhead, cloudless, unless you counted the three vapor trails from planes evidently heading south to Africa. During his many departures—business trips mostly—there was always at least a glimmer of anticipation and adventure edged with some regret at leaving his country home and hearth. He had no inkling of the trap set for this outing.
    In fact, he was thinking about Alsace’s heroic gastronomic concoction, choucroute garnie, which to Kendrick’s way of thinking is to cuisine what Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is to music. Storm the barricades, shake your fist at indigestion, let loose thunderous timpani and stentorian brass. What other meal delivered such culinary bombast? Well, cassoulet? Peut être.
    Choucroute is French for “sauerkraut,” originally a German word, but if you were born Alsatian, you had a third language and a third word for it: sürkrüt. Kendrick could only guess at its pronunciation—those four floating dots stumped him and mangled his tongue. Two umlauts in one short word? He told himself to remember to ask about it during his tasting with Martin Dreissen, a native Alsatian vintner, simply for curiosity’s sake.
    Unless he was victim of a traffic jam, Kendrick’s French home was an hour’s drive from the Marseille-Provence airport, and from there what might look like a short hop to Alsace on Air France. But no, there was more to it than that. Kendrick was used to the ever-present airport parking mess, the security lines five years after the fall of the Twin Towers, then he would have a one hour fifteen-minute flight to the Mulhouse-Basel airport (one foot in Switzerland, the other in France), rent a car, then a forty-minute drive to his destination just outside Bergheim.
    He’d reserved a window seat on an early morning flight, fourth row, and as he scooted into it, he wondered when was the last time the fake leather upholstery had enjoyed a good cleaning. Tattered in one spot, blotchy . . . Someone had stuck tape on a tear to act as a bandage. He hoped the aircraft’s maintenance crew was more diligent than the cabin cleaners.
    Oh well. His mind returned to contemplating the sumptuous choucroute garnie, one of France’s favorite gastronomic triumphs. Choucroute garnie equals garnished sauerkraut. Once upon a time, cabbage was fermented in order to render it more digestible, less acidic, its flavors deeper and more delicious. It was adorned with multiple kinds of sausages and cuts of pork, like smoked ham. He’d once dated an Alsatian medical student and had asked her if her family might have their own recipe for the traditional choucroute garnie. She showed up with eleven single-spaced typewritten pages that detailed instructions for making four kinds of sausage from scratch, and three cuts of pork, all of which garnished the fermented cabbage. Nowadays it has become almost impossible to find such a traditional choucroute garnie. Even in the heart of Alsace, the dish is often nothing more than Boiled Weenie on Canned Cabbage, and such a naked example of culinary collapse pained Kendrick. The story was, however, no different from the story of bouillabaisse in Provence, which in today’s Marseille can mean nothing more than a hunk of thawed-out fish floating in canned fish stock. He mourned when he read that 80 percent of restaurants in France no longer even cook: They simply defrost, microwave, or open a can. Why did it matter so much? Because more than anything, Kendrick valued beauty, and during his lifetime so far, he feared the world contained less and less of it.
   On his earliest wine buying trip to Alsace, he had tasted in the ancient wine cellars of Jean-Luc Meyer in Eguisheim, near Colmar. Meyer was a middle-aged man with admirable posture. He wore a tasteful gray suit and forest green tie. Office wear. Not what vignerons wear outdoors working their vines. His calm eyes never left Kendrick’s, which was not at all unnerving. He poured tastes of over thirty different wines, then afterward, instead of sending the young American novice away with a price list and a handshake, Meyer asked if he had plans for lunch. “Today we are celebrating my family’s two hundred and fiftieth year in the wine business,” he said. “There will be plenty of choucroute garnie for lunch in our next-door cellar, and one chair has turned up empty, if you care to fill it.” Kendrick thanked his lucky tastevin and accepted. The extravagant lunch was prepared by a chef from the nearby three-star restaurant, l’Auberge de Lille, and when Kendrick stepped inside, he recognized that he would be at a table—a massive, dark, carved wooden table—with a roster of food and wine royalty. He noticed the tallest man first and for a moment thought he was dining with Charles de Gaulle, then realized it was Paul Bocuse without his white chef’s toque. Then his eyes landed on Alain Chapel and André Pic. He counted twenty-nine at table, so he was the thirtieth. After foie gras on toast with Champagne, Meyer invited everyone to take their seats, clapped his hands three times, and all turned to watch as arched double doors—broad enough to accommodate the giant Alsatian wine casks as they entered or left the cellar—swung wide open. First to enter, two grinning, rosy-cheeked, pigtailed young blonde girls walking side by side and dressed in bridesmaid white, then two teenage boys wearing lederhosen and T-shirts emblazoned with the number two hundred fifty. The youngsters’ task was to drag into the dining room an antique wooden wagon heaped high with an immense tangle of steaming sauerkraut that appeared to be writhing in ecstasy, adorned with glistening roasted sausages, pink hunks of ham, and various other cuts of pork. A sensational gastronomic entrance. Then came green bowls of boiled potatoes and blue bowls of creamy yellow mustard. The aromatic complex included juniper berry and clove.
    With such a feast, Kendrick had expected a famous old vintage to be served, probably a Riesling from a notable vineyard, and he wondered how dry or sweet a wine Meyer would select to best accompany the monumental wagonload of choucroute. He was amazed when pitchers of a young, light yellowish white wine appeared.
    Once everyone had a glass of it at hand, Jean Meyer raised his. “We have an American wine merchant with us,” he announced, “who might never before have encountered an Alsatian Edelzwicker.” He looked at Kendrick. “Monsieur Thomas, edel in German means ‘noble’ in English, and zwicker means ‘blend.’ Yesterday I blended this from noble grape varieties specifically to accompany this choucroute garnie on this very special occasion. Here’s to my predecessors, to my branch of the Meyer family tree, two and one half centuries in the vineyards and in this very same cellar.” With that, all raised their glasses toward the huge-beamed ceiling before downing a sip.
    How noble was it of Monsieur Meyer extending an invitation to a green young wine merchant far from home whose French was perhaps a trifle ignoble? No problem. Kendrick found himself seated between a handsomely attired and groomed member of the Krug family from Champagne and a casually dressed, bearded tonnelier who produced wine casks—both spoke English.
    Now, many visits to Alsace later, he periodically put his Herald Tribune aside to look down at the landscape and try to figure out where he was. Much of his flight followed the vast, methodical Rhône River. He recognized Arles, and north of Arles the vineyards of Tavel, where only rosé wines are produced. Then came the stony plateau where the grapes of Châteauneuf-du-Pape produced bold reds with a chewy texture. He recognized the rocky serrations of the Dentelles de Montmirail near Gigondas, where the grenache grape thrives. A few minutes later the large, boring city of Valence came into view, followed by the vine-covered massif known as l’Hermitage—Kendrick could not help  but think of those down below who toiled to care for the vines (all Syrah grapes for the reds, by the way) and transform the grapes into wine. Might there be a winemaker as yet undiscovered who had the savvy to realize the site’s legendary potential? Bottles of Hermitage are hard to come by—there are only 345 acres of vines producing wines there. Finding great bottles of it, well, that fit Kendrick’s job description, because he was an importer of fine, artisanal wines.
    If you happened to be on the same aircraft, in row three directly in front of him, you might have scarcely been aware of Kendrick’s foot against the bottom of your seat, tapping to music only he could hear. It was nothing obnoxious, merely a musical tic. And Kendrick himself was not conscious of it, but he was tapping time to an ancient song that went back centuries titled “Banks of the Ohio” in its contemporary version. He had listened to it the previous evening, comparing different renditions recorded by various artists, and in his head he was reliving one beautiful collaboration sung by Doc Watson accompanied by the great Bill Monroe on mandolin. And if you’d turned in your seat and looked for the source of the gentle 4/4 rhythm, you’d have seen Kendrick Thomas on his way to work. While in his earliest youth, Kendrick’s hair was considered blonde; by the age of five it had turned sandy; and by the time of this flight north, entering his late forties, Mother Nature had blended some salt and pepper into the sand. His beard was similarly colored but also showed a subtle reddish tint in the sunlight.
    As a rule, Kendrick dressed casual. All the time. No matter what.